10:10 PM

The history of the DeCSS Haiku:

I wrote the poem known as the “DeCSS Haiku” three years ago, in 2001. (The poem’s full title is “How to decrypt a / DVD, in haiku form / Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.”) The 456-stanza work, sometimes described as an “epic”, was an anonymous contribution to Prof. David S. Touretzky’s “Gallery of CSS Descramblers”, which collects a variety of ways of expressing technical information about the decryption of DVDs. My poem has now become a part of the folklore of the Internet.

The poem includes a traditional opening invocation to the Muse:

Now help me, Muse, for I wish to tell a piece of controversial math.

It proceeds to describe, using only haiku-like verses with lines of five, seven, and five syllables, all the mathematical steps required to convert an encrypted DVD into a usable form.